Full ATX ECS 880G motherboard detailed

We stopped off at the offices of motherboard manufacturer ECS here in Taipei, Taiwan, to grab some shots of its latest wares. First, its upcoming AMD 880G motherboard - using a full-size ATX form factor, rather than the micro-ATX which you'd perhaps expect for this chipset.

While it's clearly a budget board, there's still a SB850 Southbridge, as opposed to the older SB750 that some other motherboard companies are considering for a couple of dollars saving. This means you get SATA 6Gbps ports, and more USB 2 ports. There's no USB 3 integrated however - ECS is instead bundling USB 3 with many new motherboards as an extra PCI-E x1 card. It makes sense, because ECS does very well in South America and other developing countries that still demand legacy over latest - so the optional USB 3 card will probably not be sold in those regions.

The 880G is largely identical to the previous 785G chipset - it's still fabricated by TSMC as is evident by the "Made in Taiwan" stamp. Despite the 3+1 power phases the board will have support for upcoming 6-core CPUs, and will also include MOSFET heatsinks, which are not photographed.

Only the basic connectors are included - there's no HDMI output for example - but surprisingly there's also no IDE either. There's also no core-unlocking available either - ECS is still working on that one and didn't know if or when it could be available. No price is stated yet for the board but we don't expect it to cost too much.

Fancy an ECS 880G for a budget build? Or do you think older 785G boards offer still better value? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

MSI does great here in Colombia, as also does ASUS and Abit and everything, we get high end products in the stores, we like to buy high end videocards, same as in CHile, Argentina, Brasil and whatever, just like any market.

Quote:

Originally Posted by articleECS does very well in South America and other developing countries that still demand legacy over latest - so the optional USB 3 card will probably not be sold in those regions.

Meh, what a dissapointment... the lamest quote ever made in this site :(

Originally Posted by paisa666MSI does great here in Colombia, as also does ASUS and Abit and everything, we get high end products in the stores, we like to buy high end videocards, same as in CHile, Argentina, Brasil and whatever, just like any market.

Meh, what a dissapointment... the lamest quote ever made in this site :(

Perhaps they're looking at data you're not considering.

I know for a fact that a board like this will fly off the shelves in India. We're a country with low purchasing power and the unfortunate mentality that games are for kids. Therefore, you have a lot of skint kids trying to convince their folks (who have low purchasing power) to buy them gaming hardware that is between 1.5-2.5x more expensive than the USA.

This board would 'make sense' to a lot of people. Integrated graphics, USB 3 (a tick on the feature list, basically), support for the latest CPU/RAM (just another way to sell the upgrade to the parents) and so on.

No one commented and highlighted the fact that this is the first motherboard launched recently that has no IDE connector, just the connector we've been dying for not to have! Other manufacturers should follow the example of removing this legacy connector and play with the layout a little bit more and add new features if possible (useful ones, of course).

Although ECS is a company aiming for the low-mid range whilst having an enthusiast board reviewed here, they deserve some praise for reason I previously mentioned.